Having spent much of my professional life as a university professor, I am pretty much unfazed by the recent college admissions scandal simply because higher education is consumed with such problems at all levels. As other educators speak out, yesterday we learned that prosecutors in Los Angeles are looking at new targets in the fraud conspiracy cases. Of the 50 people currently being charged by the federal government, 18 will plead guilty in the hopes of leniency from the court. Still, it is business as usual if you ask other scholars within academia in the US who teach at elite institutions. They will tell you that this is just a drop in the bucket within the culture of higher education.

During my career in academia, I witnessed first-hand many coerced political hirings and how nepotism related to admissions, scholarships and hiring. From the late 1990s, many university departments began to reduce the requirements for coursework such that professors report being told not to have their students read or write. The result of such policies is that higher education often resembles an encounter session: Show up, smile and look vaguely interested in the subject and you can be fairly certain of getting a decent final grade. The role of the student is more or less that of financial broker.

Unsurprisingly, where wealth has helped many students gain entry into universities and specialized programs, new technology has made this sort of cheating all the more pervasive due to the velocity of virtual communications and how digital media facilitates the doctoring of everything from documents, letters of recommendation and photos.

While it is disappointing to see Hollywood royalty participating in the recent admissions scandal, these are hardly new infractions of the so-called rules, nor are they the most egregious. The recent college admissions scandal is part of a larger problem of higher education and how it is structured to enable the wealthiest and most privileged of our society to hold onto power. From admission to completion of the degree, there are innumerable industries built around making as much money from students as humanly possible and the larger university structure turns a blind eye to this. More to the point, technology is playing a major role in how it enables this academic cheating with myriad online industries established around every facet of academia—from entrance exams, to coursework and final papers, to theses.

There is no shortage of companies willing to cash in on the education market from the preparation of entry exams through the final stages degree completion. Companies like Kaplan which prepare students for undergraduate admissions (the ACT and SAT) as well as postgraduate programs such as business, law and medical schools. Yet, the feedback from former clients of Kaplan reveals myriad stories of people who felt “ripped off” for having spent upwards of $5,000 for in-person study sessions and where the failure of exams is met with another offer to invest even more in another tier of tutorials. Kaplan is just one of many companies offering students “help” for high fees with The Princeton Review, The College Board and Manhattan Elite Prepamong its competitors.

Are test preparation companies engaging in cheating the system? Some would argue that they are simply because they create an impossible bar for poorer students who did not benefit from privately funded training courses or tutorials. Others take issue with companies like The College Board which breached its “fiduciary duty by recycling old exam questions, including those that have been publicly disseminated prior to the SAT exam” as claimed in the lawsuit filed last year against the company which owns the SAT and the Educational Testing Service (which administers the SAT). After the scandal over paying for a disability diagnosis was revealed in 2002, little has changed on these college admission prep exams as students and their families have figured out new loopholes, from having others sit their tests to bribing for changes in the final score. At that, there have been numerous leaks of SAT exams in China amidst a thriving industry which exploits online security issues.

Skip to when students are admitted into their desired university and the money-making has only begun. There are hundreds of online companies claiming to offer tutorials and proofreading services and others which actually sell completed essays. It is difficult to understand where the line is between paying for a private lesson and having coursework written by another person simply because online interactions often blur this difference. Still, companies which offer online “help” abound in the dozens even if they generally mask themselves as tutorial services while reality they are nothing more than essay mills.

While little has been voiced in the US on this front, in the UK several MPs have started to speak out on this issues as recently as 2017 where there were suggestions made to block these essay mills sites and more recently, Education Minister Damian Hinds has suggested that PayPal stop accepting payments to these companies. Some universities are even implementing “forensic linguistics” software to crack down on ghostwriting by essay mills. Only one country, New Zealand, has created a law to crack down on cheating services.

Some critics of these essay mills contend that these services prey on the most economically vulnerable but as the recent college admissions scandal shows nobody is guaranteed the intellectual endowment to get into any university, rich or poor. Sure, poorer kids have less access to the kinds of college prep education that will pave their way into the country’s best universities, but why is it not obvious to professors when students are presenting a final essay written by another? While some contend that essay mills and students are committing fraud, others like myself are far more critical of universities that have turned the classroom into an experiment of 21st century Taylorism whose aim is to turn out as many paying students into the job market as possible regardless of merit.

The answer to this problem lies is combatting technological cheating with traditional pedagogical requirements: Professors must simply require weekly written work from students allowing the professors to familiarize themselves with the writing styles and weaknesses of each student. Such practices will not only reduce cheating, but students can learn what they need to work on while having the time frame of a semester to improve their work. It is unlikely in a learning environment where students are regularly expected to turn in written work and discuss their ideas in class that they could easily rely on an essay mill for assignments that are precisely devised for and by them.

The larger problem of cheating in higher education should not focus on how online cheating is “getting worse” or “how best to tackle it.” We need to ask why in higher education the current in-class pedagogy is next to nil as class attendance in many universities is optional. Of course, students will capitalize on their professor not knowing how they think, speak or write when it comes time to settle a final research paper. With such a model, professors are lucky if they recognize their students at all.

The rise in cheating in higher education is a red light to deeper problems attached to our collective social value on education and the young lives we view as having an expiration date upon graduation. Instead of understanding that education is a lifelong process, we have perfectly wrapped up education into a short-term pyramid scheme where most everyone wins except the student.